Museum gift shops often have items for purchase related to their purpose. With the advent of wide format high resolution digital printers and the availability of art images on digital media, low volume translucent reproductions of art or designs for illuminated display are feasible.
Visitors to museums are varied. Some arrive by car and would therefore be able to purchase a bulky item; place it in a car, and take it home. Others arrive by public transportation such as a subway or bus, and therefore their carrying capability is limited. Still others may arrive by rental car while on a distant trip; but they must return by air thereby limiting the bulk and fragility of their purchase at a museum shop. For some, purchasing a compactly packaged kit consisting of a customer selected electric/frame kit and a customer selected art image packaged separately but sold in combination for home assembly is ideal; others would balk at purchasing anything that would require even the minimum of assembly involvement. Customer order fulfillment by purchase, purchase of an assembled unit at point of purchase or by shipment of an assembled unit to their home, assembled by the museum or by the company per museum order, should all be accommodated by the museum shop. Also, storage space for stock is at a premium at a typical museum shop and this is a factor favoring inventory of compactly packaged kits that can be flexibly combined.
The prior art reveals many types of illuminated display units. Some are for the display of two dimensional art reproductions. A sampling of such patents follows. For example, the lamp shade of Lewis, U.S. Pat. No. 2,660,317, has a fenestration on its surface and a recessed plate for accepting an art object in sheet form to be illuminated indirectly by reflected light from the lamp. Buzick's picture display panel for lamp shades (U.S. Pat. No. 2,177,204) is primarily for display of black and white pictures printed on translucent paper by transmitted light. Morgen's lightbox lampshade (U.S. Pat. No. 6,821,002) provides uniform illumination on its surface for viewing photographic slides placed on its surface. The Swanson U.S. Pat. No. 7,347,593 relates to a Giclee printed lamp shade that is capable of displaying a high resolution art reproduction made from a digital image file using a process for adhering an image printed on canvas to the surface of an existing lamp shade.
Many other patents in the prior art deal with the bulkiness of lampshades. They relate to knockdown, collapsible, or foldable lamp shades which can be shipped or stored compactly and then assembled and used on a lamp. Four such U.S. patents and one US patent application are identified here as a sampling of the field. They are U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,742,210 of Champan, 3,787,676 of Korach, 4,075,684 of Witz, 4,354,222 of Gall, and U.S. patent application US 2006/0239012 of Bin. None of these relate directly to the display of art.
Indeed, while the prior art teaches several approaches to the design of illuminated display units for displaying art or storing lampshade frames more compactly, none describe an efficient method to display art or any selected image in the home or elsewhere on an illuminated display unit that is compatible with the operation of a museum gift shop or other institution or business establishment.